The Fire Train
Overview Before becoming a fiery runaway train, it is just a normal passenger train that transported people around Russia, consisting of a 2-6-2 tender steam locomotive numbered 2747, a baggage car, a sleeping car, a dining car, and a rear observation car. It isn't seen until Anastasia and her friends have boarded the train to get to Paris that it is hijacked by Rasputin's minions and used in his first attempt to kill her. The first scene of the train shows it leaving St. Petersburg and then traveling through a forest. Rasputin's minions later catch up with the train and hijack it by entering the engine's air intake and overheating it, causing the boiler to glow red hot and flames and sparks to shoot out the chimney, and making the train speed out of control. When Anastasia, Dimitri and Vlad enter the baggage car, some more of Rasputin's minions fly to the coupling between the baggage car and first coach and cause it to explode, separating the rest of the train from the engine and baggage car with Anastasia and her friends on board. As Anastasia and Dimitri try to get back on their feet after the explosion, Vlad looks through the door at the front of the baggage car to find the engine flaming out of control. Dimitri investigates by climbing over the engine's tender and jumping down into the cab, to find no driver or fireman. When he checks the speedometer, it climbs rapidly and the glass breaks from the high speed, then the firebox doors suddenly open and flames shoot out onto the cab floor. Narrowly escaping getting burned, Dimitri jumps back into the baggage car and tells Anastasia and Vlad that there is no one driving the train. He tries to see if they can jump off the side of the baggage car, but soon realizes its too risky due to the speed the train is going. He then plans to uncouple the baggage car from the speeding engine, but a few more minions overhear their plans and rush to the coupling and overheat the linkages, melting them together into one piece of metal so it cannot be loosened. Dimitri jumps between baggage car and tender to try to uncouple it, but finds that he can't and has Vlad hand him a tool to try and break the coupling. Vlad hands him a hammer which he hits the coupling multiple times with, however it doesn't work when the hammer head breaks off, but then Anastasia hands him a lit stick of dynamite. He places the dynamite in the coupling and the three duck behind some baggage as it explodes, separating the baggage car from the flaming engine, while also taking out the front of the baggage car and damaging the back of the tender. However this ends up working as a double edged sword when they realize they can't apply the car's hand brakes because they had been rendered useless from the explosion. Dimitri then says that they could just eventually coast to a stop, however Rasputin's minions had flown ahead of the runaway train to a bridge and destroyed it. After seeing the destroyed bridge and realizing they're rolling too fast to coast to a stop in time, Dimitri uses a chain with a hook attached at the end and attaches it to the rear bogey. Dimitri is nearly killed when some metal debris break from underneath the baggage car and almost hit him, but luckily Anastasia pulls him up in time before he gets hit. After pulling him back in, they both push the hook and chain out of the baggage car and it latches onto one of the railway ties, but it only ends up ripping up some of the track until it tears the rear bogey off from the baggage car, causing it to slide down the tracks sideways without even slowing down. When it does, Anastasia, Dimitri and Vlad jump out the blown off end with their luggage in hand, landing safely in the soft snow. After escaping the runaway train, the flaming engine and still sliding baggage car plunge off the destroyed bridge and crash down in the gorge below with a massive explosion, caused by either the over pressured overheated engine's boiler, the remaining explosives in the baggage car, or a combination of the two. Notes Many may wonder why the train had no crew. It is possible that the driver and fireman panicked when they saw their train begin to glow and overheat, could not stop it and possibly jumped from the cab. In real life, steam locomotives do not have an air intake on their boilers. They actually draw air in through the firebox when the smoke and steam exhaust are mixed inside the smokebox and get expelled out the chimney (or smokestack). This creates a draft that pulls the air into the firebox helping the fire burn hotter, which helps boil more water in the boiler and make more steam for the locomotive to run. The engine is of a 2-6-2 wheel arrangement, also known as a 'Prairie' type wheel arrangement, named after the first 2-6-2 locomotives that were used on the prairies of the Midwestern United States back in 1900. The train's engine is based on the Swiss Federal Railway's Class Eb 3/5 2-6-2T tank engine, only modified to look like a Russian tender engine with the side water tanks and rear coal bunker removed (though the sides of the coal bunker are still attached) and smoke deflectors added to the sides of the smokebox. Category:Trains